14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC 4.0 Beta 5, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has been released with some very important updates.
The OpenELEC developers are moving fast with their operating system are pushing new releases almost on a weekly basis, improving the distribution and including a large number of new packages and other various updates.
“This release includes some bugfixes and improvements since 3.95.4 (beta4). Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC with the last fixes (its shown as XBMC 13 beta4, but its not the final beta 4 of XBMC 13!), fixed issues with Youtube- and other streams, AMD Audio/Video issues introduced with the kernel 3.14 update and some more suspend/wakeup fixes.”
“The team has made a huge effort to make this one of our best releases yet. Since the OpenELEC 3.0 and 3.2.x releases, we have worked hard to improve OpenELEC in a number of areas. Some of these are visible changes, others are backend changes that aren’t as visible to every user but are certainly worth mentioning.,” reads the official announcement.
One of the most important changes that you will see in this latest version of OpenELEC is the implementation of the latest OpenSSL package, 1.0.1g, which comes with the fix for the Heartbleed exploit.
The developers didn't touch the Linux kernel or other important packages, but they did promote some important fixes. For example, the async suspend/resume is now suspended by default, a patch to fix the audio function has been implemented for AMD APUs, Igorplug USB support has been added, RTL8723AU driver support has been implemented, a patch has been added as a workaround against the GCC-49423 bug, and the applet “pgrep” has been added.
XBMC 13.0 Beta 4 “Gotham,” the distribution that is being used for as a base comes with Android hardware decoding, various Raspberry Pi and Android speed improvements, stereoscopic 3D Rendering, better touchscreen support, improved UPnP capabilities, lots of audio engine improvements, better subtitle searches, extended Python and JSON-RPC API for developers, FFMpeg 1.2, and much more. You can find out more about the underlying XBMC system for OpenELEC from our initial report.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download OpenELEC 4.0 Beta 5 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.